Chinese Exchange KipCoin Has Been Hacked

The Chinese Bitcoin exchange Kipcoin is not as well known as Huobi and OKcoin, but it apparently had a lot of bitcoins to lose. The Chinese exchange announced that it lost some or all of its user’s bitcoins and will temporarily be shutting down.

Details are scarce at this point, as the site’s only announcement was posted in Chinese. The best we can tell from the Google translation of the announcement, the exchange claims to have lost over 3000 bitcoins in the hack. The announcement was made on the site’s Weibo page. Weibo is a Chinese social media site that sits somewhere between Facebook and Twitter.

The hacker apparently gained access to Kipcoin’s server back in May and downloaded the wallet.dat file at that time. For months, according to Kipcoin, the hacker did nothing with the funds before beginning to move them in December 2014. It is not clear why the site didn’t secure its funds at that time.

The site says it will come back online and will then allow withdrawals of the other digital currencies it held: Litecoin and Dogecoin. Its holdings in Yuan are safe and will presumably be used to pay back users in Bitcoin eventually. Before that can be done however, the exchange says it needs to collaborate with law enforcement in finding the hacker.

The site seems to indicate that the Chinese Spring Festival will delay things significantly. The site relaunching will be delayed until after the festival and the site expects law enforcement to wait until after the festival to respond. It is unclear why exactly the Spring Festival will delay things so significantly.

We have seen a lot of Bitcoin scams this week, with multiple exchanges losing their customer’s funds or otherwise shutting down.

The site says the attackers accidentally left some clues towards their identities. They say that will be passed onto law enforcement. If the attackers return the bitcoins, they say they will consider lifting the complaint.

We have reached out to kipcoin for an English language statement and will update this space if they reply. Below you can find the addresses kipcoin claims belong to the hacker.

Ian started writing product descriptions in 2011. He transitioned to journalism in 2012 and has been cited by media outlets large and small. He is a Co founder of Coinjournal.net and the author of the Bitcoin Guidebook.
A consistent procrastinator, when he isn't writing he can usually be found doing something to avoid writing. To his own surprise, he managed to write a book, which you can purchase here: http://goo.gl/s0a4An and in local book stores.

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